The Daily Beast Podcast - The Hard Truth About Why Harris Was the Wrong Choice for America

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, co-hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie aren’t pinning a lot of the blame on Kamala Harris’ election loss on the vice president. Plus! Podcaster Jared Yate Sexton joins the show to discuss how Trump will affect the country years beyond his upcoming term. Then, Nicholas Grossman, an international relations professor at the University of Illinois and senior editor of Arc Digital, discusses his latest piece, “America Chose This.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today. Author and

Political Analyst Jared Yates Sexton joins us to talk about the urgent need to confront authoritarian threats in the wake of the recent election, focusing on Project 2025 and its impact on marginalized communities. Then, Nicholas Grossman, Professor of International Relations at the University of Illinois and Senior Editor of Arc Digital, joins us to discuss his recent piece called America Chose This, all about the implications of Donald Trump's decisive 2024 election win. But first, let's have some fun. So, we're on the other side. It's not good over here.

And I would like to formally apologize to everyone who I might have given some hope for erroneously thinking that Kamala Harris was going to win this election. And as I said to a bunch of people, Tuesday night and Wednesday, this is like the first time in my life I've overest. estimated people. And I don't mean her. I mean the voters. And we'll get into what we think happened or why we think what happened happened. But yeah, look, we all know that nobody's feeling too great right now. And that's absolutely understandable and kind of unavoidable. I don't see any way of avoiding that right now. And I think, you know, yes, we're going to, I think we should take these days right after. election day and and just kind of feel free to be numb and feel free to be despondent.

And I know this is going to be a lot easier said than done. I think we need to say, okay, that's enough of that shit, time to get back to work. So that's where I am right now. Danielle, how about you? I would say that I am in a place of eerie calm. And I say eerie because I have not cried. I don't have any tears to shed anymore. At least that's how I've been feeling. I feel quite numb and hollowed out.

And I agree with you in the way that I didn't have a ton of faith in Americans. And I'm going to say in particular, and I'm specifically talking about white Americans. I did not have faith because what I have said in so many different ways is that Donald Trump and the Republican. have been incredibly successful in being able to turn the demographic shift that this country is facing into the boogeyman, into the thing that white people need to fear the most, and in order to hold on to their place and position and power in this country, then they need to create the

conditions for others to exist in despair and depression. They need to create the policies that are going to ensure that they can hold on to this place of power in the long term. There was actually a really interesting interview that I saw recently. Chef Eddie Hong had on his Instagram a conversation that he has with like this wealthy white male Trump supporter and he's asking him as they're sitting down over Chinese food nonetheless. Why did you vote for Donald Trump? And he says in no unequivocal terms. because I know that Donald Trump will slow the dispossession of white people and our power in this country.

And so people can have deep analysis around the economics of the thing or we can talk and we will about, you know, immigration and this, that, and the other thing. But what it comes down to is that over 50% of this country, 52 or 53% of white women, roughly, I think, what is, what is, it, like 60 some odd percent of white men decided that in order to slow this dispossession, Donald Trump was their only solution. And not only their only solution, but they are, you know, Andy, you said folks are, you know, people, everyone is numb. Not everybody. You know, I know that you left the platform of X, but people on there are elated.

They are ecstatic about what is to come. The fear that the marginalized people feel, the fear that, the marginalized people feel, the fear that, you know, whatever it is, the 48% of us feel, they are thriving on. And I think that it's, to me, it's that sociopathic mentality that I am most fearful of is to the extent at which they're going to wield their power for the end being pain for as many people as possible. And they find glee and joy in that pain. I don't know if you guys saw Nick Fuentes as well. Yeah. And what he has said, the white, the the white supremacist that dined with Donald Trump and Kanye West said that, you know, to women, your body is my choice forever.

I mean, it is, it is deep and it is really sick. But this is what a majority of white people in this country voted for. And we can't ignore that and pretend that it's something else. To be clear, when I said people were numb, I meant people on the left, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know what you, I know what you mean, Andy. I'm just saying in general. I mean, that's who I was talking.

two, basically. I'm assuming the people who are on Twitter being the assholes that they are every day are not listening to this podcast. So I hope this goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway. By saying that people are numb right now, that, of course, does not dismiss the very, very real fear that a lot of marginalized people are feeling right now. All I was saying by that is, it's okay to find yourself staring vacantly into space for the next couple of days because you absolutely just can't believe that what we are going to have to deal with for the next four years. And then I think after the next couple days, we need to pick ourselves up. Those of us who are numb need to pick ourselves up and shake that off and get back in there.

So that's what I meant there. But yeah, I think the stuff you said is absolutely right. And I think that, first of all, I want to say, be very skeptical of people who are going to say what went wrong if it matches sort of their wish. list of what they want. And because you're going to be hearing a lot of this. You're going to be hearing a lot of people further to the left yelling at Kamala Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney. You're going to hear a lot of centrists yelling at her for being okay with trans people existing. People are already talking about throwing trans people under the bus, which to me is, first of all,

to think that that had anything to do with the election is crazy to me. But also just, I don't think you throw your morals under the bus. And you don't go around. saying, well, these people are expendable. Their rights are expendable. Their right to live a life free of fear is expendable. Fuck that, to put it bluntly. My broader point is just, just at least for now, because data is still being examined and nobody really knows anything yet.

So be very skeptical of people claiming that they know what should have been done differently that would have won this election. That said, I'm not saying don't talk about things you think could have been done better. Just, again, be skeptical. skeptical of the thing that you think is your sort of, you know, the thing that you're hopped up about that everyone else feels the same way. And if only they had listened to me, they would have won. Which I think brings you to my next point, which is that I got to say, I don't pin a lot of the blame for this on Kamala Harris. Did she run a perfect campaign? No, nobody has ever run a perfect

campaign. I think particularly given the circumstances, i.e., it's only been since late July, when Joe Biden dropped out. So she really didn't have a lot of time. And I think for the most part, she did a very, very credible job. I don't think this was a, I'll just say it. I don't think this was a Hillary 2016 thing where you can, maybe you don't assign all the blame to her. And you shouldn't. But you could say, hey, there are a lot of things she could have done. done differently. I don't feel that way with Kamala Harris. And I am not a K-Hive person. Like, I was not her biggest fan in 2020. And, you know, she is not my ideal candidate. So I'm not like, I'm not trying to, you know, back her because of, I've got blinders on or anything like that. But I think she ran a

pretty damn good campaign. Again, not perfect. And yeah, someone could say, well, what about, yeah, sure, she should have done that a little differently. But all that stuff, I think for the most part, all the stuff she should have done differently is nibbling around the edges. And I just feel like there's not a lot she could have done differently. And my personal opinion, I think it's a little foolish to blame this on her. You're nicer than me. I think that it's absolute bullshit to blame this loss on the Harris Wall's ticket. In a hundred days, they put together one of the most formidable campaigns we have ever seen. This had nothing to do with her. This is the thing that gets me about racism and misogyny is that it has you questioning like yourself. This had nothing to do

with perceived deficiency on the part of the Harris Wall's ticket. And I know that people will love, particularly Democrats as they run and leap to move to the right, will love to have this conversation and do this autopsy about all of the ways in which she was wrong. The only ways in which she was wrong for America is that she is black and Asian and a woman. That is how she was wrong. And that's the reality. Just the same way. Like I could look in a very conscious way and say, here are some of the things that Hillary Clinton in 2016 took for granted and did wrong. This campaign knew all of those things from 2016, took that, took also the things that they learned from 2020 and applied them. What we have to understand is that there was never going to be a facts and figures case that was going to be presented to racist and too misogynists that were going to have them let go of their perceived power in the goal of trying to help other people.

That was never going to be the case. So while we could sit down and tell folks the ways in which Donald Trump is going to be bad for them as well, they do not care so long as he is going. going to be worse for people that they don't like. And that's the reason. So there's no like rationalizing with people that are inherently racist and see their position and their power in this country being challenged by the perceived other, whether that other be black people, which it often is and always is, whether it be now too educated and too lippy of women and too free of women who don't know their place and will be put back in it.

So whether it's gay or trans people that like have the audacity to want to live inside of their own skin and not operate on this false binary. To me, the analysis is really a critique of America and how far we have yet to come and probably will ever come because we don't really want to have the hard conversations about embedded racism and misogyny, which is what won this election, along with the help of American oligarchs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, who use their platforms to either suppress information, depress information, or spread misinformation. Yeah, absolutely. And look, I want to talk about another thing that I've seen a lot of people sort of hitting about Kamala Harris. And they say that she should have distanced herself more from

Joe Biden. And here's how I look at this. That's, first of all, that's easier said than done because she was his vice president. Second of all, Joe Biden did a pretty damn good job. The problem is that because of misinformation and disinformation, people don't know that, I guess, or see that. The third problem is, why do I feel like if she had tried to distance herself from Joe Biden, the response to that would have been, who does this uppity black woman think she is? Mm-hmm. Like, that was the first thing I thought of. Like, the first thing that they will say is, who is this ungrateful black woman that Joe Biden elevated?

And now she's out here distancing herself from him. And I just find it hard to believe that we wouldn't have seen that from a lot of places. I sort of feel like she was, that was a real lose-lose situation for her. And look, one of the things that's been written about, that was something I really didn't pay much attention to is the strong anti-incumbency feeling all across the Western world. And if you look at, you know, in Europe and here and how many incumbents were tossed out this year. And it really is staggering. I think it's almost every incumbent party was thrown out of office this year. It feels like there was just this wave of anti-incumbency.

And look, for all intents and purposes, she was the perceived as the incumbent. even though she's not Joe Biden. So I get why the argument is she should have distanced herself from him. I'm not really clear where, though. Should she have distance herself from record low unemployment? Mm-hmm. Should she have distanced herself from record high stock market? I mean, look, people are going to bring up Israel and Palestine. I don't care what side of that you're on. I don't think that means a hell of a lot to the majority of American voters. Anyway, that's how I feel about that, because that's one I've seen thrown around. Everything I've seen, mentioned, well, she should have distanced herself from him here. I'm like, really? But it almost always comes down to the economy. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you about the economy.

Like, by every normal metric, the economy is in good shape. And the economy is particularly in remarkably good shape, considering where we were four years ago, even though there are so many Americans who seem to think they were better off four years ago, because as someone tweeted, Americans, and I think this is true of humans in general, have no sense of object permanence. somehow they remember a completely crashed economy under Donald Trump as being good. I don't know how you fight that. I honestly, I don't know how you fight people who simply believe things that aren't true and won't be moved from that belief when you show them actual real facts. I don't know how you fight that. And that's the wave that Donald Trump wrote. Yeah, 100%. Like I said, you can

can't argue facts and figures with people that have told themselves that Donald Trump is the second coming of Christ. Like you can't, you can't show facts and figures to people that believe that he is the Messiah. He is, you know, an unusual tool that which, you know, to, to wield in order to exercise like the policies that they have been foaming at the mouth for for the last 50 and 60 years. So there, to me, there was no appeal that she was going to offer to these people that are formulated, have formulated their lives in a scarcity mindset that believes that there just is not enough for all of us. And some of us should have nothing. Right? Like should, like are deserving of nothing. And not even are deserving of nothing,

but on top of that are deserving of pain. So like that there's like there's no, what would the slogan have been to try and bring those people over? You try to link arms with more thoughtful and conscientious Republicans who believe in democracy if agree on nothing else. Right. And that didn't work. Like, oh, you don't have to align yourself with this guy over here. Here are some people that share your same values, but they also believe in the value of democracy. I believe that white America, they decided in this election that democracy no longer works for

them. Because democracy means adding more people to a table that they say there is not enough, that exists for them already. So don't pull up those chairs. This is all mine. And if the way that I keep it mine is through authoritarianism and autocracy, then that's what I'm going to do. That's what they voted for.

Donald Trump got up there at a debate and said that they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats. And the only possible response to that is, no, they're not. And that was the response. But it didn't matter. And that's the truly sad thing. the truly frightening thing. It didn't matter that the Haitian immigrants who moved to Springfield, Ohio, and took jobs in factories, took jobs that were sitting vacant. They didn't steal those jobs

from white people. And they improved the economy of Springfield, Ohio, radically. And none of that matters. Because Donald Trump got up there and said, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs. And people were like, yeah, we got to get these people out of this country. There's no way to fight that other than the way that was tried. Would you say that, well, that's, that's just not true. He's lying. You know, he's making shit up to try to scare you. It didn't matter. That's what people believed when they walked into the voting booths on Tuesday. That's what they believe today. And apparently that's what they want for at least the next four years. A hundred percent.

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Folks, I am very happy, so happy as a matter of fact, to welcome back to the new abnormal. My friend, author, podcaster, Jared Yates Sexton. He's the author of The Midnight Kingdom, a history of power, paranoia, and the coming crisis, which guess what, has arrived. And a co-host of the Muck Rake podcast, Jared, it's been just a couple of days since the election. and I just want to start off with asking the question that is very hard to answer, which is, how are you doing? You know, Danielle, first of all, I really wish we kept from meeting under these circumstances.

I know. I wish we could have a conversation that didn't involve all of these dire situations. I'm okay. I'm feeling a mixture of things. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling worried about a lot of people who are in really bad positions right now. or in the crosshairs of this authoritarian regime in waiting. And quite frankly, I'm pissed off and I'm motivated.

And I think that is the way that I navigate these things. I think that is how my own personal sort of operating systems orient myself towards these things. I am ready for some really, really awful shit to come down the pike. But I am also readying myself to take those things on as they happen. Yeah, I think that what most. concerns me in this moment is that Project 2025 gave us a snap shot, a very long, in-depth look at Maga's vision for America. And it is one where they want the populace to be broke, broken, and unwell. That goes from everything to taking fluoride out of water, which will only spurn

waterborne viruses and bacterias and infections and all of these things to shutting down any opportunity for equal access to education, retirement, Medicaid, all the things. And what scares me, I think right now is how quickly, because how quickly these things will happen. Because what we weren't privy to in Project 2025 was their 100-day implementation plan, which they had kept under reps. And what people believe is that they were able to ride out the first four years of the Trump regime, oh, I'll be able to do the next four years. What I've been arguing, and I want to know if you agree, is that this ain't going to be just four years. It's going to be much longer than that. And they are going to solidify power through the executive branch, which the Supreme

Court already began doing with presidential immunity. But to bypass. whatever type of conflict that they could come up with in Congress, they're just going to give him carte blanche. So for me, the worry is how quickly this will all happen and what the results of that are going to be because who is going to be hurt, of course, are those that are from marginalized communities because the pain is the point.

But everybody is going to experience the next great American depression that this regime is going to cause. by pulling away social safety nets, pulling away Department of Education, pulling away health and safety guardrails and parameters that have been in place. So my question to you is how quickly, how much time you think we all have? And do you think that this is just going to be for years or two years as folks are like, we'll get him at midterms? And I'm like, hmm. Well, I mean, to get him at midterms would mean having a workable strategy. And it has now been proven that there was never a strategy to begin with and we now have to cobble together an actual strategy. And I want to be very intentional as I

answer this because we have entered into a new era. And, you know, I've been warning about this for years. And one of the things is the time to stop this has passed. The time to actually make sure that some of the worst case scenarios come to pass, that's gone. And we had that opportunity. Back in 2016, if you think about the idea of you're living in a gated city and there is an army coming towards you, the time to lock the doors in order to ward them off is before they get there. They're now in the city. And as we look at this, we have to wrap our heads around a couple of crucial facts. And to be frank, and this is some hard love, there are a lot of people who are going to have to grow up very quickly. They need to get away from some very, very delusional, self-serving

fantasies that have been motivating them for years, that this was all fun, that everything was going to be fine, that they could meme their way out of it, that they could, you know, simply engage in a lot of these soothing behaviors. The truth is this, we are now engaged in an all-out war, and that war has been coming towards us for a while, and the time to ward it off is gone. This is now going to be the work of our lives. Even if there are elections and years, even if we are able to elect a Democrat or at least keep a Republican from getting elected, this is going to be the fight that defines the rest of our lives. That's the truth of this thing. If you can think about it in terms of a disease, you can either detect the disease

early and mitigate the consequences of it, or you can detect the disease later when it has metastasized, and you have to take care of the radical consequences of that. So what we're actually talking about right now with Project 2025, with Elon Musk having control, unchecked power over the budget. I'm already thinking about what they're going to do. What we're actually talking about, Danielle, is we are talking about the culmination of a strategy that has been playing out for decades. The Republican Party, on behalf of their

billionaire donors, have been working to destroy the progress of the 20th century, to get rid of all the social safety nets, the regulatory power of the federal government, everything that was put in place to actually serve citizens. They've been going after that, education, science, reality itself. Now all of a sudden, we are a couple of minutes from midnight on that. They have the apparatus in place that can actually deal a final blow to it. The question should have been answered with the 2024 election, and quite frankly, it should have been answered with the Joe Biden administration. It should have been answered with the 2016

election. And to be frank, it should have been answered before the 2016 election. We now find ourselves in the reality of the moment, which is we are in the middle of a battle that is going to last the rest of our lives, and it's going to define our lives. And quite frankly, for anyone listening to this who has children or grandchildren, it's going to define the lives of their children and their grandchildren. All of this is not to make people feel powerless or hopeless. This is to talk about the facts of where they are and to start leaving behind childish delusional notions that we are not dealing with what we are actually dealing with. You laid it out so beautifully and so perfectly. This is defining who we will be now moving forward. And I personally think, Jared, too,

that the time for pointing fingers or Democrats doing what they normally do, which is let us do this autopsy and then move vigorously to the right and forget about the base of black women, forget about the base of progressives. We need to move dramatically to the right so that we have a fighting chance. I think that the reality is that the fighting chance was 2024 and that is now past us. And so my question to you is then, what does resistance look like moving forward? because none of us inside of these United States, we have not lived in an autocracy or a dictatorship before, so we have no idea what resistance looks like

in the terms of this new context. We've only ever known go out in March, go out in protest. Well, Donald Trump wanted to shoot people back in 2020 for doing so. He has already talked about operationalizing our military against the American people. So, Jared, what does it look like? What do you think it looks like to resist inside of a country whose rules are now completely and totally thrown out the window?

Well, I would like to start by probably reframing the way that some of the people listening to this podcast are thinking about American politics, look at politics. You know, you were talking about pointing fingers and we could talk all day about the results from the election and what they show us about politics moving forward. But that's not actually what we're talking about right now. I need people to understand that 2024 was the moment that we could have possibly mitigated some of these consequences. And we could talk about the tactics of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party all we wanted. I want to talk about the consultants and the strategist and the operators within the Democratic Party. We now know that billions of dollars were spent on this election. And by the way, that we had one grifter political action committee after another that raised tens of millions of dollars,

basically to enrich themselves. And all of this is to point out that what we have done is we have outsourced resistance. We have expected politicians and operators to take care of it for us, almost like hiring a contractor to take care of a leak or something going wrong in your house. Those notions are no longer true, and it's time we left them behind because we have been betrayed by these people. And they are going to be fine because they have made millions of dollars and they have lined their pockets. You know, they went ahead. They sold their soul for the silver, and that's where things are. Now, if we actually want to make a difference, what we need to do is on a personal level, we need to take a look at ourselves and decide what it is that we actually want, where it is that we actually want to go.

What do we want this country to look like? I understand that you oppose Donald Trump and the Republicans, and that's a great starting point. You need to understand why you oppose them. What is it about this agenda that offends you so much as an individual? When you decide that, you start figuring out your principles. And principles are not about supporting a party. They're not about sharing things on social media. They're not about proclaiming what it is you believe. It's determining what it is that you want to live for and what it is that you're willing to die for. That is one of the first rules of surviving in a dictatorship or an autocracy.

You have to decide, I'm not going to go along with this. I'm not going to put my head in the sand. When you're able to do that, you're going to be able to talk to other people. And what I want to challenge people to do besides healing in themselves the ways that authoritarianism and capitalist oppression has leaked into them, it's to start reaching out to other people and having real conversations, to actually talk about how you're treated in your workplace, whether or not you think it's right that people are being exploited like this. And I'm not just talking about coworkers. I'm talking about immigrants.

I'm talking about vulnerable communities. Once you start dealing with those things and we're talking about actual material conditions and experiences, you can start to form coalitions. And Danielle, what you just said is exactly right. We are entering into a period where intentionally state power has created apparatuses in order to stave off protest. And I'm not just talking about the Gaza protest in which we saw students being absolutely decimated by law enforcement. I'm also talking about what happened during the BLM protest. I'm talking about surveillance. I'm talking about all these things that some people have said, man, this is awful and then turned a blind eye to. The reason that we need to be with other people is because we need to recognize the interdependence of our situations, how I rise or fall based on what happens to you and what happens to people that I have never met and will never meet. And when that comes together, all of a sudden there's a lot more people in the street. And, you know, all you have to do is look at China. You look at Iran. You look at actual social movements. And if this resonates with people, look what happened with civil rights. It wasn't that Martin Luther King made a speech that resonated with people. It's that they got in the streets and actually stressed the system until the system had to look at its own privilege and make decisions. Liberals did not suddenly decide to pass civil rights legislation. It wasn't out of the kindness of their hearts. It was because they were. were confronted with the reality of their privilege and the oppression that came from that

privilege. And so what is going to happen if we are going to get to a place where things are actually going to get better is a lot of people are going to have to be made uncomfortable. And that is the basis of modern America is comfort where you can find it. That's why it's a premium. You have to pay extra to be comfortable in America, right? Whether it's a gated community or to live in a blue state away from the oppression of the red states, people are going to have to take a look at what the actual conditions are that underline their own comfort and their own privilege. And you don't get a Donald Trump, you don't get the Republican Party, you don't get an autocracy or an authoritarian regime if people have not been living comfortably at the expense of others. And so this is going to take a spiritual, political, cultural, and social sea change. And if what I'm saying sounds hard and daunting, it's only because it's hard and daunting. But the alternative to it, the alternative to it, honest to God, is a type of tragedy that I don't think most people are ready to really wrap their minds around. But quite frankly, the time to wrap your mind around it is now.

Yeah. You know, the thing is, and there are a lot of people, particularly black women on social media right now, that are saying, I'm done. I'm actually tired. I'm tired of being on the front lines of America's war with itself. America's reckoning with its racist and misogynistic foundation, right, that they choose to ignore and saying, you know, where I am going to be is taking care of myself and my community and my family and leave the 50% of white women who voted for Kamala Harris to do the work, leave the rest to do the work. What do you say to that? Because I understand that the path ahead is going to be.

going to be. I don't even actually, I don't even think me, I've wrapped my mind around it. But what do you say to those that, particularly for black women, that have been carrying the burden, I'm not doing it anymore. Because this is already going to be damn near impossible for me. So you're on your own. I'm glad you brought it up this way. And the first thing that I would say is that I'm terribly sorry. I am terribly sorry, not just for the circumstances that have led us to this point and have inundated the lives of vulnerable communities and populations that have been targeted and discriminated for forever. But I also want to apologize for something else. In the past eight years since Donald Trump became a political figure in the United States of America, what black women and other communities

that were discussing, what they have experienced are the aesthetics of support and allyhood. They have seen on social media a lot of people who post a lot of things, who say a lot of things about what they care about and what their principles are. And a lot of that was delusional, and a lot of it was dishonest, and it wasn't backed up by anything that actually meant anything. And we're now seeing like all of these DEI and diversity statements at universities and corporations that are going away. And this entire thing about quote unquote wokeness, there are people who have woken up to the actual circumstances and those people are your allies. But we also need to understand that a lot of people saw a financial and political advantage

to using those things as a costume and using those things as a marketing opportunity. So the first thing I would say is I'm sorry. And the second thing that I would say is this. Right now people are tired. And part of the reason they are tired is because some of them have put their blood, sweat, tears, and livelihoods on the line, and they were betrayed. And they were not helped by people who purported to help them or who purported to be their allies.

And I understand that exhaustion. The other part of this is a lot of people, were misled by politicians. They were misled by online influencers. They were misled by a lot of people who told them, hey, we're almost done with this thing. It's going to be totally fine. And I want people to imagine, and I hope this metaphor resonates, I want people to think about, you know, being on a road that is many, many, many miles long and you're being pursued by wolves as you're on that road. It is exhausting. You think that you only have another mile left to go after many, many miles. And then you suddenly realize that you have another five, six, ten miles left to go. That disappointment and

frustration and exhaustion is natural. And I would invite people to take the moment of rest that we currently have. We have a few months until this thing actually takes off. This is a time to fortify yourself, to catch your breath, to drink your water metaphorically and literally, to actually get yourself in a position where you are ready for the fight that is coming. Some people aren't going to be able to do it. But guess what that means? You and I and the other people listening, we have to pick them up and help them. We have to do our part. And that's what actual solidarity is about. It's about going on a journey and understanding that sometimes you are going to carry others and sometimes those people are going to carry you. And the only way that we can actually make that happen

is to build trust and intimacy and solidarity. And if there's anything that the United States of America is missing right now, and we are missing many things, it is trust, intimacy, and solidarity. I understand why people feel like they're not going to get picked up. I understand why people feel alone. That is part of the abuse of authoritarianism, which is systematic abuse, which is supposed to crush your spirit and kill it. And by the way, that's what it's about. You're supposed to reach a point in which you have no hope and you either put the armband on and you goose step down Main Street or you close your door and hope and pray it doesn't come to your door.

I have bad news for everybody. It's coming for your door. And putting that arm band on is not an option. So the whole point is we need to fortify ourselves. We need to find trust and we need to find hope and solidarity and intimacy that has been missing. And that's the only way we're going to make it through this thing. My friend, we will leave it there today.

Jared, I just, I can't thank you enough. Can't thank you enough for these words today. And for what I know, we'll be deep conversations in the weeks and months and years ahead. Really appreciate you. Danielle, I appreciate your work. And it means the world to me to know that there are other people out there doing this. Thank you. Nicholas Grossman is a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois.

and the senior editor of ArcDigital, which you can find at ArcDigital.com, and where he published a piece called America Chose This, that I thought was really interesting. He joins me now. Nicholas, thanks so much for being here. Hi, Andy. Thanks for having me. So let's start here. Trump winning in 2024 feels a lot different from Trump winning in 2016. And this is sort of the basis for your thesis, right? Yes, that this was a decisive win that he in 2016 had such a. a narrow election with defeating Hillary Clinton that it was easy to say any little thing might have made the difference. And 2020 was also really close, but he lost. In both of them, he lost the popular

vote solidly. And here in 2024, he looks on pace to win the popular vote. He swept the swing states, and he made gains in just about every demographic and just about every state. And that is out of the range of it was a open question or some slight little tactical tweak could have made the difference. And for the first time since he's been in politics, and I'd include the midterm elections, with him as the head of the Republican Party, in all five of those elections, this is his best showing and the one that is most of a mandate to the extent that elections give that. Yeah, for sure. And it's also different in the sense that in 2016, you can make the argument, hey, people were voting for something different. And it wasn't like a referendum on Trump on what

he believed. It was, it was sort of a, yeah, let's burn this shit down kind of thing. see what happens. And you can't really say that now. We all know who he is. Right. It was mask off by this time. So the first one, he was in a good position to be the sort of candidate that a lot of Americans project their hopes onto, you know, the sort that were into him. But I'd say Obama 2008 is another good example of this, that people just think, oh, this is someone like me, this is someone different who's going to shake things up. And they don't know what it's going to be like. So they can imagine a lot of it. And then in 2020, he was the sitting president. There was a lot of questions about with things like COVID. You know, they're obviously been problems in the administration,

things people didn't like. But as long as you gave him a pass on COVID and stuff like the economy, it was pretty good. And, you know, people just support the incumbent. But this time, we have a coup attempt. And we have criminal trials. And we, you know, a convicted felon, which poor Americans have never nominated, let alone voted for. And he was giving these really bigoted speeches and threatening violence and there were leaders of, you know, even of the United States military who had worked with him very closely, who he personally appointed, that were saying he was a fascist and a lot more people were using that were. And the campaign was living down to it. And after all that, that was when he had his best showing. So we can't dismiss it as something that is, you know, I am not happy

about this, but we can't dismiss it as something that, oh, maybe the American people kind of don't know what he's like or, you know, they know not what they do. And in this case, they have, you have seen him a lot, and they saw him at, at least what I would call, his worst ever, and they opted for it. So I interpret this. I don't see how we could not, but interpret this as affirmation for Trump and what he has been offering. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Talk about the Harris campaign. You are skeptical that you could have really done anything differently that would have made a difference, which I agree with, but give me your reasons. So I think there were a number of ways, of course, if people can either nitpick the campaign or the Democrats more broadly. I think the

obvious one is that we'll never know the answer, but that Joe Biden could have dropped out a lot sooner, say, after the midterm said he wasn't running again, Democrats could have done a normal primary. Maybe Harris emerges from that. Maybe someone else does. But either way, they'd have a year now or more of practice and of working out the kinks. But any of that, or really the post-election finger-pointing the parties typically go through, any of that stuff. I don't think it really applies, given how much Trump won by. Those are the sort of things that could maybe move a few votes, a half a percentage point here, something like that, but not this much.

So the Democrats did way more of things like canvassing and phone banking and so much money on ads. And I don't think they could have done much more than that. Or if they had just, you know, done somewhat different policy, I think this wasn't a policy election that Trump was not offering a detailed policy platform that then Democrats did not have enough details for, did not have enough proposals. And any of those, you know, some slight messaging tweak of different, anything, anything at all, really, that those are small board.

Those are things that maybe made sense in 2016 when you could say just a few thousand votes in this particular place and Hillary would have won. But that is not the case here. A policy tweak or some additional material benefits. or a different bit of rhetoric or a different ad to a different group, that does not swing numbers of this size. So any of that stuff, I think, is largely a waste of time. The Democrats were rejected by an American majority.

They did not win the popular vote and just failed to eke out an electoral college win because they just didn't say quite the right thing to quite the right people. Yeah, for sure. I want to circle back to something you said a little earlier. You talked about sort of this anti-income sentiment. And that does seem to be a large part of it, not just in a number. America, but around the developed world. Do you see that as sort of a huge factor? It's a big part of it, that this was a reaction to, in part, to COVID and to inflation and to the

hangover from that. And we're seeing this across democracy. So right as a baseline, the American electorate, like every other electorate in a democracy in the world, was approaching an election as we're angry at the government. We're unhappy. Obviously, this is not everybody, but, you know, say the majority, that we're unhappy about the government. We want, say, something different, without necessarily knowing what that different thing would be, but as long as something is different. And that element, there's always been some throw the bums out element of the American electorate. And it's possible that Biden won them in 2020 because they were swinging against Trump. And now they sort of swung back against Harris.

But when we look at how Harris ran the campaign or whether she would have been, if someone else would have been better, the problem is they all would have been incumbents. And they all would have been tied to it. that the vast majority of voters do not do the sort of elaborate navigation where I'm angry at the government. I'm upset about things. The president is a Democrat. You know, there's this Republican, but there's this other Democrat who's saying that they're critical of the president in these particular ways.

That's not how a lot of voters think. If you're somebody who is mad at the Democrats, then you vote for a Republican. Democrats make this mistake quite a bit. I'd say 2012 was another one where a number of Democratic Senate and House candidates thought that Obama's unpopular, let's run against him. I'm going to run against Obama. And they all lost because what happens when somebody wants to vote for a candidate who is going to stand up to the Democratic president? They vote for a Republican. Same thing vice versa. That you want someone to stand up to Trump, you vote Democrat. You don't vote for a Republican who maybe says a few things,

but overall supports him. And so that applies to Harris maybe a little more because she was the vice president. But I think that would have applied to any Democrat. Every single one of them would have faced the same accusations. The Trump Vance campaign took their entire. Biden playbook and just replace the name Harris, attributing all sorts of stuff to the vice president that clearly the vice president doesn't have the power to do. And they could have done that to any senator or governor. They could have said, you know, absolutely any Democrat is, I don't know, too woke or whatever the attack would be. And that would apply to all of them and to any incumbent. And the anti-incumbent energy could not possibly be with the party that is currently a power.

Yeah. I think there's so much truth to that. And I said this earlier in the show that not really something that I had thought about prior to Election Day. And now, sort of in retrospect, I'm hitting myself in the head for not realizing, you know, yeah, this is part of a continuum that we've seen over this past year. You said earlier, you said, you don't really think this was a policy election at all. And I know what you mean, and I agree with you. But there were things where Trump, they may not have been detailed policies, but they were things like deporting 20 million people, putting tariff, on everything. And to the extent that he did talk about policy, do you think that made a difference? Yeah, that's fair. That's stuff like his, so it was mass deportation, tariffs, and Donald Trump is not

subject to the law. You know, but Donald Trump put the law. He can do crimes when he wants. That those are sort of the three policies that they had been pushing. And yeah, I think that that matters, that that's clearly appealing to people, that one of the things a lot of the countries, especially a lot of Democrats are still processing, is that saying things like, we want to take this vulnerable minority and violently round them up and concentrate them into camps and then throw them out of the country and probably kill a bunch of them along the way is not something that appalled a lot of the public. It excited a segment of the public. And I mean, ballparking, I don't know, a quarter, a third of the Republican Party, half, you know, something like that. And then the other part of it

was basically indifferent, you know, as in maybe they don't like it, but clearly they don't mind it enough to vote against it. And so I admit, I thought that that would be the sort of thing that would appal more people, that that would be a political loser, the, you know, where you just, I don't know, you say, papers, please, and like a Nazi accent, in German accent, and it's out of some movie, and that people are appalled by that. And for many complicated reasons, but no, they're not. I think with the, when I say the not a policy election at all, that partially I'm thinking about it in the competitive aspect, could someone have done better than Harris with a different policy platform? And that one I'm extremely skeptical on, because if people found appeal in mass deportation,

there's no democratic offer whatsoever that is going to outdo that. And I wouldn't want Democrats to propose. No, no, no, no, we're going to deport even more people or even more violently or something. And nobody would believe it anyway. So they're not winning. So as a, oh, policy, a different policy could have helped. And then also with even the broader idea of that policy details matter, because even the mass deportation plan didn't have any details. When it came to things like health care. Trump did the same, you know, I'll tell you in a little bit, and he's been doing that for 10 years at this point and has never produced the plan. And, you know, part of this is media kind of demanding details from Democrats, but just that idea of that voters will look at policies

and think, but can this actually work? I need to see how you're really going to execute it, and that that's a thing that wins them over. That really doesn't seem to be the case because Trump didn't have any of those details. And a lot of times would say things, like, oh, just, you know, trust me, I'll make it better. Or even with tariffs, you were saying, things that a lot of Americans said they really care about inflation. Trump put out a economic policy plan that virtually every economist said would raise prices a lot. And people didn't care. And, you know, people were fine with it. So they weren't evaluating it in that sense. They were maybe going somewhat on vibes. But I'd even take the mass deportation thing as I want a president who's going to be an

asshole to migrants. Even stuff in the debate on when people said Harris won the debate and an art because Trump went on that crazy rant about, you know, they're eating the pets. they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs. Maybe that didn't turn people off. Maybe that was the sort of thing where that was either where they were indifferent to it or maybe they even liked it. The only way to combat something like that is to say, no, they didn't. They didn't eat the dogs.

They didn't eat the cats. But that doesn't matter. That absolutely doesn't matter to a large segment of the population. They don't really care that the thing never happened because to them it's still emblematic of something that could happen or they don't believe you when they say it didn't happen. Right. For the vast majority of people who believe this, the way the causality worked was not, I have a neutral opinion about immigrants, but I feel strongly that you shouldn't eat pets.

And now I hear that some of these Haitians are eating pets. Well, that means I don't like them. That wasn't how it went. It was, I don't like immigrants. I don't like Haitians. I hate whatever a group of people. And now I hear some vicious rumor about them. Yeah, I believe that.

That sounds like them. You know, I hate them. So sure, I believe it. And that is, I mean, I think saying it's not true. is, I don't know how else to respond to it, but if the people you're talking to don't care whether it's true or not, saying it's not a convincing argument. Yeah, unfortunately, or even not simply saying it, but actually giving real facts. And, you know, you had Republican officials in Ohio saying, no, this isn't true.

And none of it mattered. You write about this in the piece, and I've seen arguments similar to this, that, well, Trump voters, you know, they weren't really paying that much attention to the election. they don't know about him, what we know about him. You know, they wouldn't have voted for him if they'd known about all the corruption and the sexual assaults. And I agree with you here. You are skeptical of this. I am very skeptical of that. And that is part of the, when I say, mask off. And, you know, we've seen him in public eye for such a long time at this point that I'm very skeptical that

people simply haven't heard of it. It's similar to the immigration thing with which way causality goes that is, you know, oh, I really don't like racism. And so, So if it turns out that he said a bunch of racist stuff, then I'll vote against him. But so I want to vote against him. So I'll just deny that he said the racist stuff. Or, hey, I never heard it. But you know, if you showed me video of him saying something racist, well, then I wouldn't want to vote for him.

Then I'd vote against him. And I don't know how anybody has gotten to this point without seeing at least some of that stuff. And we saw this as a good example with the Madison Square Garden rally towards the end, where that broke through in a lot of information streams. you know, for example, a lot of Puerto Rican musicians that were sharing it and getting, you know, that attention to millions of people and expressing concern about it. The accusations of sexual assault are so pervasive from so many different ones and things like, you know, and some of them have been

high profile, the criminal trials that, so all of it. I'm not saying that people have seen absolutely every aspect of things he's done, but I am extremely skeptical of the claim that they just do not ever hear about this. And if they did, then they've seen. And if they did, then they would change their vote. And that is unfortunately typical of a big mistake. I think a lot of Democrats and maybe a lot of especially say leftist or social Democrats make, which is assuming a sort of false consciousness that, you know, like, oh, the conservatives, they know, they don't understand. They're really liberals or progressives or socialists at heart, but they have been manipulated in such a perfect way. And yet we cannot come up with the ways to manipulate them back. And I think a much

simpler explanation is they are adults with agency who like the stuff that they vote for. I think that's absolutely true. And I think it's letting them off the hook to pretend that they didn't know what they were voting for. And it actually really bugs me because I believe, as you do, that they knew exactly what they were voting for. We're talking about a huge number of people. So of course, different people vote for different things, different reasons. But there were some who liked it. And for the rest, it was, you know, not a deal breaker. It was not something that they really minded. That's the one that I really don't buy. You know, that the denial was simply because they just never heard about it, as opposed to because

it is somewhat willful. Or even as a basic thing, if somebody could seek out other sources of information, you know, so if, I don't know, you hear about the Trump criminal trial and a lot of right-wing media that you consume says, oh, it's all made up, well, I don't know. Someone who actually cares about the truth and cares about the law might look at some more centrist media or might read the court documents themselves, or might think for a second and, hey, if a unanimous jury thought this, and I have a lot less information. Maybe they know something I don't, but that was none of it. It was just a rejection of it. And that is at least at some level of choice. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about what America, you know, the title of your piece is America

chose this. Let's talk about what in your mind America did choose by electing Trump. We've covered some of this in the piece, but in a more macro sense, what did voters choose here? So whether they fully understood it or not, the 2024 election was. a referendum on constitutional democracy, rule of law, the U.S.-led international order, and whether we value truth and factual reality, and those things lost. So I don't know exactly, so I'm sure that most voters did not think about it in that sort of abstract way, but in a one very concrete, there's no way you miss this way, is voting for whether Donald Trump can commit crimes. And, you know, maybe not in those phrases, of course, but it's more like,

should Trump, now that he's been convicted by a jury, should he go to jail? Or now that a grand jury indicted him, should he be prosecuted? That those really basic questions, a lot of people said no, that, you know, they disrejected it. And that means once you really, oh, and things like, say, letting the January 6th, the convicted attackers, the seditious conspiracies, convictions, letting them out of jail. So the, that part was not subtle. He was very open about it. It was all over the news of various types, you know, even something like, I don't know, Fox or whatever, covering the criminal trials, even if they're covering it as Trump being persecuted, as an unfair victim or something, they're still covering it that way. And so people could see that. And by voting for

it, maybe there's an element of cynicism, as in, you know, no, every politician is corrupt, which is excessively cynical and just helps the most corrupt ones. But even if they believe that, now, you know, oh, this politician is so openly corrupt that he's being indicted, well, you know, sure, go for it. Or if anything. I mean, I could do a, a bunch of these. Another example of it is with America's position in the world. Very few voters vote on foreign policy, but to the extent that they did vote on that for Trump, it was things like being decently more supportive than Biden was of the Netanyahu government in Israel. I think one way to sort of put it bluntly is people who had been criticizing the Biden-Harris administration

for, in their words, giving Israel and BB a blank check are going to see what a blank check actually looks like, and things like, I don't know, support for Russia against Ukraine, that this might not have been what everybody was really thinking about, but they still were rejecting that broad idea of rule of law, constitutional order, no man is above the law, and the values of American pluralism, the, you know, Martin Luther King and I have a dream, or Barack Obama and in no other country in the world is my story even possible, or the others along this line that where a vision of America as valuing pluralism and diversity and equality and we're all in this together. And that was in part what voters rejected. Yeah, I think sadly, I cannot argue with

a word of that. Nicholas Grossman, thank you so much for being here. I encourage people to go to arcdigital.comedia to check out this particular piece and the other things that you've written. And thanks so much for your time. Sure. My pleasure. Thank you. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. So it's a new fucking day and a new week. Oh, no, it's not. It's the end of the week, but it's a new fucking day.

So how are we closing out this pre-apocalyptic time with your fuck that guy? Well, part of me wanted to make me the fuck that guy for actually believing that the American people would be so turned off by Donald Trump's disgustingness that it would matter and being horribly wrong about that. But I covered that. I'll apologize again. And I will move on because. yeah, apparently we're going to have four years of not having any trouble finding people for this segment. And I'm going to start with a guy named Mike Davis. And he was a clerk for Neil Gorsuch, and he was a senatorial aide. And he is now considered one of, I guess you'd say one of the

frontrunners to be Donald Trump's attorney general. And he decided to post on Twitter on when Day, here's my current mood. I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. And then in parentheses, he put legally, politically and financially, of course, of course. And obviously he's talking about Democrats here. I don't think I have to explain why this is, let's call it troubling for someone in general, but for someone who perhaps may be the next attorney general, it is. beyond troubling and it is, I think, symptomatic of what we're going to see for the next four years and that we're going to have to be on guard for. And I mean, this guy has been spouting stuff like that

for a long time now. And Donald Trump is a huge fan of his. Donald Trump has called him tough as hell and has said, we want him in a very high capacity. And Adam Wren at Politico quoted Donald said that he witnessed Donald Trump Jr. saying to Mike Davis at the Republican Convention, quote, I want you to be my father's attorney general for four years. And it's all really, really scary. And there's going to be a parade of grotesque people marched in front of us for the next four years. And so this is an early one. So I'm kicking it off with him. And I'm saying to Mike Davis, fuck that guy. I like that you think that it's only going to be four years.

Well, yeah. That's a fair point. There I go being hopeful again. There you go being hopeful again. Let me slap that reality back at you. My friend. Yeah, I think that the parade of grotesque people is going to be worse than 2017 was the beginning of Trump's first administration.

I think that the stupidity, but the racist, the misogyny, like everything is going to be on full display. And they have carte blanche to do it because who go and check them? Not a person, not an agency, not a place. So for as long as we're able to still say it, fuck those guys. All right, Daniel. Close us out. Who is your first fuck that guy of the upcoming regime? Yeah, the first, and certainly won't be the last, it's going to be Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

And their immediate response, just the congratulations, the adulations, the excitement coming from these two multi-white, multi-billionaires. This is what Jeff Bezos says, no nation has bigger opportunities. All success in leading and uniting America we all love. That's what he said in response to Donald Trump's election win. In uniting the America we love, are you cock-eyed? You idiot. What are you seeing? Did you see unification at Madison Square Garden?

What are you talking about, sir? Similarly, Zuckerberg said, congrats. Mark Cuban, congrats, you won fair and square. And what's funny, but not so funny, is that Trump's victory, according to The Guardian, adds $64 billion worth of wealth to the richest top 10. And guess, Andy, who is in that top 10? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, take the one, two, and the three slot. That the day after Donald Trump gets elected, they add $64 billion to their old. already grotesquely rich selves.

So their congratulations isn't just to Donald Trump. It's to themselves. Their greed. And they're insatiable, insatiable greed that knows no end. So the oligarchs have spoken. The wealth gaps will become increasingly obscene and quickly. And so for that reason and so many more, fuck all of those guys. Yeah.

Not much to add there. Mark Zuckerberg has been a bad dude for a very, very long time. Jeff ain't much better, if not better at all. I don't even know why I said that. All of these people are concerned with precisely two things, wealth and power. And, you know, I think for Zuckerberg, power is more important than wealth. And I think for Bezos, wealth is more important than power. But it doesn't matter because they go hand in hand.

Think about these things the next time you want to post on Instagram. or Facebook or open up your Kindle or use Amazon Prime. And I'm absolutely not yelling at anybody. I mean, everybody has to make decisions for themselves. And I am still an Amazon Prime member. So who the hell am I to talk? But I just encourage people to think about who you're supporting and who your money is going to when you use these people's platforms.

Because really, it can't be said enough. Fuck those guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at

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